The invention relates to a method for setting and controlling an apparatus for preparing mail pieces.
Many apparatuses for preparing items to be mailed are capable of processing postal items into mail pieces in accordance with instructions read from the mail pieces. The instructions may for instance relate to the selective feeding of inserts to be added to some of the main document documents only, to indicate which ones of personalized documents belong to the same mail piece or to indicate whether an envelope is to be closed or not. Such instructions are typically provided on the postal items in the form of standardized optical mark reading (OMR) codes. The addition of OMR codes typically requires special software for which the implementation needs to be co-ordinated and only postal items carrying OMR codes according to a particular standard can be processed.
It is also known to program apparatuses for preparing mail pieces to operate in accordance with marks according to different standards, but this is usually quite cumbersome.
From U.S. Pat. No. 4,800,505, it is known to provide markings on documents that refer to a set of instructions associated to the respective individual document stored in a memory. The printing of such markings also requires special software and moreover needs to be co-ordinated with storing associated instructions in a memory and making available the instructions at the time of processing of the individual printed documents.
From U.S. Pat. No. 5,283,752, it is known to output instructions for controlling a printer and a mail preparation stations, to feed the main postal; items directly from the printer to the mail preparation stations and to supply the instructions for controlling the mail preparation stations in accordance with the printing of the main postal items. Thus, the printing of markings for the processing of the postal items can be omitted completely. However, special software is required for generating the instructions to be outputted for the mail preparation stations and reliability of the synchronization between the supply of instructions and postal items is critical for reliable processing of the postal items.
In U.S. patent application 2007/0176356, it is disclosed to designate a region in a displayed image of a mailpiece to be printed or of a template for mailpieces to be printed as the region containing information to which expressions for performing certain operations may be related in accordance with rules defined, created or modified using a rules editor. In operation, the commands/expressions are processed by a rules engine and converted to an appropriate OMR or Barcode mark by an assembly/scan code generator. A disadvantage of this method is that access to digital data in a suitable format representing the documents to be printed is required, that room must be available to print the marks and that the marks disturb the visual quality of the document.